Husserl, Heidegger & Modern Existentialism

Bryan Magee in conversation (over five parts) with the Heideggerian scholar Hubert Dreyfus.

Amongst the topics covered are the deeply Cartesian nature of the Husserlian project, Sartre’s incoherent attempts to produce a Cartesian reading of Heidegger, the anti-Cartesian nature of Heidegger’s thought (and his rejection of Husserl), explanations of Heideggerian terminology, and the more comprehensive incorporation of the body, as such, into the Heideggerian perspective by Merleau-Ponty.

Phenomenology is seemingly a far more complex school of thought than mere Cartesianism on steroids (contra what certain people amongst the MR crowd may think). Husserl is but one version of the concept of phenomenology.

Thanks for that post Graham. That talk clarifies a lot. I particularly enjoyed Dreyfus’ clarification of Heidegger, viz. that authentic being meant something like a bracketing, or as I suggested, a white boxing* of purposes which are not altogether founded (in spite of anxiety or pressure to conform, etc) - though these purposes would be in deeply patterned, pre-existent corporeal structures and relationships, that have been too normal and close for us to have had an everyday language for.

However, with our relationships being as broken as they are, much of our language should still have a great deal of use!

.. needs some modification, some Heideggerian and MR ontological systematization.

I think that I was approximating that project with my first post and others (though I tend to take a protracted view - of cultural patterns)

Another thing that the videos show is confirmation of Jim’s observation that Hiedegger made a particularly significant contribution with the “as” aspect among Dasein.

* Hegel also seemed to describe something like hydroplaning or surfing when it comes to the enactment of being.

The only real issue is figuring out how to acquire territorial separation and sovereignty for some portion of the world’s white patriots. Without discrete and defensible sovereign territory, the white future is extinction via extermination and/or miscegenation. Ontological conundrums, evolutionary puzzles, sharing our disgust at racial pollution - none of these topics brings us any closer to that goal.

The key concerns are ETHICS (justifying to ourselves what must be done to save ourselves) and POLITICS (figuring out the practical strategies to reach our racial goal). I suppose these other issues are relevant to our racial ethics (eg, one of the justifications for WN could be that racially homogeneous societies are more fitting to the human personality as evolved, and thus would be happier places than ‘diverse’ ones - but isn’t it easier just to point to black and Muslim crime stats and those groups’ general undesirability?) - but only distantly so.

I don’t know why WPs seem to think whole conceptual revolutions (other than disproving the easily refutable bromides of the current Cult of Diversity) are necessary simply to awaken whites to the various threats - to safety, health, prosperity, civility, military security, and even public morality - diversity poses. Like any other mass movement, diversitarianism may have deep roots, but as a political matter, it is a relatively recent phenomenon (though it’s starting to get somewhat old: I made that exact statement (except I mentioned “political correctness” instead of “diversitarianism”) over two decades ago to a foolish and unappreciative Federalist Society meeting). Much of what WNs, here and elsewhere, find philosophically objectionable was present in Western thought and life much earlier, and yet it then worked no racial mischief. Whatever GW or Dr. Lister might find ontologically problematic about, say, Victorian Britain, diversity was not an issue, nor do I think the reason lay only in the contemporary state of the economy and transportation technology.

It was once the state of racial science and social science, as well as a general lack of public awareness of their truths, which held back a WP politics. But no longer. The scientific work has been done, even if the case against multiracialism continues to develop. And our publics are no longer insulated from the racial ‘facts of life’. Diversity today is in everybody’s face. What holds back nationalism is white ethical misunderstanding. That is where the philosophical revolution must be inaugurated.

The following article in a mainstream US foreign policy journal will be of interest to many in the MR community. It includes such apposite gems as this, which would surely find favor in these parts:

Spengler rejects the aim of studying the past through scientific methods and opts instead for an analytical framework focused on a rigorous pursuit of historical analogy. This may seem mystical, but Spengler’s rejection of scientific methods in probing the rise and fall of civilizations may be a kind of forerunner to today’s intellectual movement called “complex adaptive systems.” This nascent analytical framework rejects linear scientific methods in explaining fundamental principles of organization, evolution and behavior within the animate universe and instead explores nonlinear interactivity among “agents” within a “system,” whether living cells, immune systems, organisms, human communities or national economies.

Jim, I am speaking a bit prematurely but my initial reaction is this - I was a bit surprised to hear Dreyfus commending Merleau-Ponty such.

I had read at least one of his books but it did not resonate with me particularly. Perhaps that was because the conversations that I was involved with were already taking for granted the place of the corporeal amongst a Heidegger type scheme. The “embodied” amidst the world we are thrown was not given a great deal of attention but the word embodied was important to acknowledge for a non-Cartesian project.

Toward that end, I coined a term, “corprisocial.” However, in terms of scientific rigor and the analysis of perception by the individual, Mearleu-Ponty’s notion of corporeity should be highly relevant and actually would probably be a better lead for you do elaborate in the ontology project - that is an analysis of deep evolutionary patterns and their connection to perception. I guess that could be very meaningful - sure! ...regarding the corporeal connection to the TFG’s (taken for granteds), tropisms and the guidance of social rules structures, definitely - good idea.

And I think your observation of the “as” to concretize the internal relation of dasein is significant as well.

Spengler rejects the aim of studying the past through scientific methods and opts instead for an analytical framework focused on a rigorous pursuit of historical analogy. This may seem mystical, but Spengler’s rejection of scientific methods in probing the rise and fall of civilizations may be a kind of forerunner to today’s intellectual movement called “complex adaptive systems.” This nascent analytical framework rejects linear scientific methods in explaining fundamental principles of organization, evolution and behavior within the animate universe and instead explores nonlinear interactivity among “agents” within a “system,” whether living cells, immune systems, organisms, human communities or national economies

.

Indeed.

I’m way out of my depth in this area but on a related note, common sence informs that applying reductionism or Newtonian physics (linear scientific methods) to living organisms, especially humans, is utter folly - a fools errand. Of course reductionism works just fine on non living things. I.e., if you want to build a car, for instance, we can reduce all the component parts of a car down to a certain vector. Humans and human nature/behavior is alltogether different. Human biology and human psychology are nonlinear and infinitely more complex systems subject to chaos theory. Moreover no two humans are the same. Hence, modern scientists abandoned Newtonian physics in their attempts to understand the human body/mind. They’ve long since moved on to a much more holistic nonlinear approach.

I guess this perceptual notion could connect with all kinds of investigations into semiotic connections too, such as the semiotics of physical chracteristcs (e.g., symmetry being semiotic of an atavistic form and largely replacing and invasive species); the semiotics of social rules which point to our destruction, rules which are misleading..

It would be really interesting to see how it connects with the corporeal patterns that are consistent enough to call structures, say distinctive of certain native European means and ways…and then how these structures relate to social rules, their use and abuse..

What are Cartesianism and non- or anti-Cartesianism? I’m somewhat familiar with Descartes general ideas, but I’m not sure what is meant by these labels. Wikipedia describes Cartesianism as mind-body dualism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesianism

That article on Spengler I linked to is worth reading. I thought that little snippet would appeal to MR’s burgeoning “phenomenological nationalism”, but the overall article dealt with Western (esp American) decline from a Spenglerian (of course, there was nary a mention of race, but I did learn that Spengler had long ago predicted the West’s population die off due to feminism, which I am more and more coming to despise; very prescient of him).